[ update 17th Oct 08: there is an easier way to do this now that iPlayer Downloader supports radio programmes. Just use the same procedure described on the BBC iPlayer page to get an MP3 file. ]
EyeTV, which I normally use for recording from DVB, has crashed a few times recently, leaving me with missing episodes from audio series on BBC7.
Luckily, you can “listen again” to everything on BBC7 from the last 6 days. Unluckily it’s all in the stupid RealMedia format. But that’s OK, here’s a way of downloading it and saving it as an mp3 file.
To do this, we need mplayer. SmallDVD doesn’t use mplayer, but Mac users can it from MPlayerOSX. The mplayer binary is buried away deep in the application files at:
/Applications/MPlayer OSX.app/Contents/Resources/External_Binaries/ mplayer_intel.app/Contents/MacOS/mplayer
Then find the URL of the RealMedia stream on the
BBC7 site
. It will be something like: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/listenagain/tuesday/rams/0900.ram
To download the stream as a wav file:
mplayer curl http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc7/listenagain/tuesday/rams/0900.ram -vo null -ao pcm:file=output.wav
(note the backquotes)
Then you can convert it to mp3 with lame (included in the SmallMP3 distribution):
lame –b 64 output.wav output.mp3
…although I use SmallMP3 to trim the files first.
Probably no point using a bitrate higher than 64k, as that’s what the RealMedia files were in.
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